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A solar flare erupted from a departing sunspot on September 16, releasing a pulse of X-rays and extreme UV radiation which caused a shortwave radio blackout in Africa and the Middle East. Frequencies below 25 MHz were affected for up to an hour after the flare.

Solar flare strength is measured much like the Richter scale which measures earthquakes. Solar flares are classed A, B, C, M or X where each successive letter corresponds to a 10-fold increase in energy output. A-class solar flares are barely above background radiation emission from the sun.

Spaceweather.com reports that the September 16 solar flare, exploding out of sunspot AR3098, was an M8-class, meaning it was nearly an X-flare, the most powerful kind.

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope is showing off its capabilities closer to home with its first image of Neptune. Not only has Webb captured the clearest view of this peculiar planet’s rings in more than 30 years, but its cameras are also revealing the ice giant in a whole new light.

Most striking about Webb’s new image is the crisp view of the planet’s dynamic rings — some of which haven’t been seen at all, let alone with this clarity, since the Voyager 2 flyby in 1989. In addition to several bright narrow rings, the Webb images clearly show Neptune’s fainter dust bands. Webb’s extremely stable and precise image quality also permits these very faint rings to be detected so close to Neptune.

Continue reading “New Webb image captures clearest view of Neptune’s rings in decades” »

Scientists have long studied the work of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the Indian-born American astrophysicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1983, but few know that his research on stellar and planetary dynamics owes a deep debt of gratitude to an almost forgotten woman: Donna DeEtte Elbert.

From 1948 to 1979, Elbert worked as a “computer” for Chandrasekhar, tirelessly devising and solving mathematical equations by hand. Though she shared authorship with the Nobel laureate on 18 papers and Chandrasekhar enthusiastically acknowledged her seminal contributions, her greatest achievement went unrecognized until a postdoctoral scholar at UCLA connected threads in Chandrasekhar’s work that all led back to Elbert.

Elbert’s achievement? Before anyone else, she predicted the conditions argued to be optimal for a planet or star to generate its own magnetic field, said the scholar, Susanne Horn, who has spent half a decade building on Elbert’s work.

Many biomedical researchers spend their careers searching for big discoveries – the next wonder drug, vaccine, or device that’s going to solve the greatest challenges in modern medicine.

But many monumental findings have small beginnings, routed in foundational R&D and a genuine curiosity about basic biology. Just look at the history of Nobel Prize-worthy discoveries, such as CRISPR-Cas or GFP: These discoveries are, at first, not appreciated for the dramatic, long-term impact that they end up having on biotechnology and medicine.1,2

University of Buffalo scientists have undertaken a study that shows a process to reverse aging in muscle cells. Aging in muscle cells is a function of…

Dr. Joscha Bach (MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics) is an AI researcher who works and writes about cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, and multi-agent systems.

He is founder of the MicroPsi project, in which virtual agents are constructed and used in a computer model to discover and describe the interactions of emotion, motivation, and cognition of situated agents.

Continue reading “Joscha Bach — From Computation to Consciousness” »

Eleven-year-old Simons only took a year to complete his bachelor’s degree, which usually takes at least three years.

In a conversation with the Dutch daily De Telegraaf, Simons said that, “I don’t really care if I’m the youngest.” “It’s all about getting knowledge for me.”

“This is the first puzzle piece in my goal of replacing body parts with mechanical parts,” Simons said.